I finished Dostoevsky’s Demons a few days ago and had to sit with it. It is stunning how reading Dostoevsky can increase my heart rate, make the voices in my skull start to chatter to each other, bring on an “O my god” sensation, and how he forces me to look into the souls of others and see their suffering rather than make snap judgments—and to look into my own soul with the same calm compassion. This book was hard to get through. It is infamous for being erratic, violent, and choppy. It probably should have been 130 pages rather than 530, but it will never leave me. He accurately diagnosed and predicted the nihilism that destroyed Russia a few decades later with Communism. It is stunning that the exact same strain of nihilism can be seen all across the West at present. Some of the sentences in this book could be applied word for word to our era.

He wasn’t listened to back then. I wonder if we will listen to him now.